Oracle and adversary arguments
• Given some computational model, the oracle tells
the outcome of each comparison. In order to
derive a good lower bound, the oracle tries its
best to cause the algorithm to work as hard as it
might.
• Take the example of a tournament where the
values are called players and the largest value is
interpreted as the winner and the second largest
is taken as the runner up. So the problem is the
similar to finding the largest and the second
largest number out of a set of n numbers.